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Б) Life for man who killed lover’s husband
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By Helen Johnstone
A COMPUTER programmer who killed his lover’s husband after she helped to plot the murder was jailed for life yesterday.
Adrian Littlebury, 54, who admitted murdering David Tomkins, 51, in October last year, bought a shotgun four days before the killing. He had earlier taken lessons in clay pigeon shooting to learn how to use a gun, Reading Crown Court was told.
Penelope Tomkins, 49, who claimed she could not end the affair but was unable to leave her husband for fear of loosing the love of her two grown-up children, was jailed for 3 ½ years after admitting soliciting to murder between June 28 and October 28 last year.
Mr Tomkins, a council surveyor, was shot in the back with a 12-bore shotgun as he got out of his convertible sports car outside their rented home in the village of Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire.
In a letter to her lover after the murder, Tomkins wrote: I am as guilty as you are – my love for you goes beyond this life. God forgive us both.”
Passing sentence, Mr Justice Blofeld said: “It remains a complete mystery why the two of you, a mature man and a mature woman, both of positively good character, should have allowed yourselves to get involved in this matter.”
Tomkins, who married at 20, told police that her husband was a domineering man who drank and was careless with money. Her domestic difficulties were compounded by her father’s death by breast cancer that was diagnosed in 1996. She also had a history of a depressive condition.
Littlebury, whom she met while working as receptionist at the same company, had also suffered ill-health and their mutual difficulties had brought them together.
Tomkins’ daughter, Amanda, who was in court for the sentence, left afterwards without taking up an offer to see her mother in the cells.
(THE TIMES)
Задание 6. Ознакомьтесь со следующими текстами: а)“Joining by Brazing’, б)‘Patents and Inventions’, в) ‘Touchy-Feely Computing”, г)’Powerful Management Capabilities for a Variety of Networks’, д) “Nations in Race to Produce World’s Fastest, Most Powerful Computer”. Определите, к какой из разновидностей функционального стиля научной прозы они принадлежат. Укажите, какие характерные черты данного функционального стиля и особенности подстиля присутствуют в каждом тексте. При подготовке этого задания рекомендуется изучить материал части 2 данного пособия.
А) Отрывок текста “Joining by brazing” (E.R.Perry)
Heating techniques
The method of heating depends on the type of application and the materials to be joined. Resistance heating, dip brazing, flame brazing, induction brazing, salt or flux bath brazing all have their place, although for high quality work, wherever possible, the trend since the early 1960s has been for cold wall vacuum furnaces, fig 9.
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While it is well-established practice to join a number of materials in air with chemical fluxes protecting the joint from attack during brazing, this approach is totally inadequate where fine tubes are involved, due to subsequent difficulties in removing flux residues. In such cases, depending on the materials involved, brazing may take place in cracked ammonia, forming gas, argon or hydrogen after passing it over P2O5, heated Cu, reactivated Al2O3, and through a liquid air trap to achieve a dew point of -50°C as
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The effect of the brazing cycle will probably affect the properties of the parts being joined and with higher brazing temperatures grain growth can arise. However, there are many instances where higher strengths are required with the heat-treatable alloys when a brazing alloy may be selected in order to allow the joining process to coincide with solution heat treatment. Age-hardening can then take place in a second heat treatment. Age-hardenable aluminium alloys, the Nimonic series and stainless steels of the FV520-type typify materials that are treated by this method.
A major problem is caused by stress relief leading to dimensional changes during the brazing cycle. This may be overcome by machining wrought stock to 0.5-lmm oversize. After an anneal close to brazing temperature, machining is finished to the correct dimension and the component is ready for joining. In instances involving sheet or foil materials, the recommended approach is to make fabricated parts to the required final dimension and then to anneal near the brazing temperatures. The parts are then resized in their dies prior to applying the brazing alloy.
With dissimilar sections, particularly careful attention is needed due to the ability of thin sections to absorb heat quicker than thicker ones. Sound practice is to arrest the heating cycle about 50°C below the brazing temperature and dwell at that temperature for a sufficient time to allow equalisation of heat throughout the furnace charge, otherwise distortion is to be expected together with altered joint clearances.
Stress can be introduced into a joint when brazing parent materials of different coefficients of thermal expansion unless suitable provisions are made at the drawing board stage. The stress induced might cause the outer member of a tubular joint to expand away from the inner member at the brazing temperature so that the selected filler will not fill the gap. Conversely if the joint is arranged so that the metal of higher expansion is innermost, hoop stresses generated in the outer member can bring about cracking. (Welding and Metal Fabrication)
Б) PATENTS AND INVENTIONS
When an invention is made, the inventor has three possible courses of action open to him: first, he can give the invention to the world by publishing it; keep the idea secret; or patent it. Secrecy obviously evaporates once the invention is sold or used, and -there is always the risk that in the meantime another inventor, working quite independently, will make and patent the same discovery. A granted patent is the result of a bargain struck between an inventor and the state, whereby, in return for a limited period of monopoly (16 years in the UK), the inventor publishes full details of his invention to the public.
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Once the monopoly period expires, all those details of the invention pass into the public domain. Only in the most exceptional circumstances is the life-span of a patent extended to alter this normal process of events. The longest extension ever granted was to Georges Valensi: his 1939 patent for colour TV receiver circuitry was extended until 1971, because for most of the patent's normal life there was no colour TV to receive and thus no hope of reward for the invention. But even short extensions are normally extremely rare.
Because a patent remains perpetually published after it has expired, the shelves of the library attached to the British Patent Office contain details of literally millions of ideas that are free for anyone to use and, if older than half a century, sometimes even re-patent. Indeed, patent experts often advise anyone wishing to avoid the high cost of conducting a search through live patents that the one sure way of avoiding infringement of any other inventor's rights is to plagiarize a dead patent. Likewise, because publication of an idea in any other form permanently invalidates future patents on that idea, it is traditionally safe to cull ideas from other areas of print. Much modern technological advance is based on these presumptions of legal security.
Anyone closely involved in patents and inventions soon learns that most ’new’ ideas are, in fact, as old as the hills. It is their reduction to commercial practice, either through necessity, dedication or the availability of new technology, that makes news and money. The basic patents for the manufacture of margarine and the theory of magnetic recording date back to 1869 and 1886 respectively. Many of the original ideas behind television stem from the late 19th and early 20th century, well before Baird aroused public interest. Every stereo gramophone sold today owes its existence to theory patented by Blumlein in 1931, and even the Volkswagen rear engine car was anticipated by a 1904 patent for a cart with the horse at the rear.
Such anticipations can have surprising significance. The German chemical giant, BASF, was recently refused a patent for the clever idea of pumping expanded plastics into a submerged ship and thereby floating it to the surface. The grounds of the refusal were that the German Examiner had once seen a Walt Disney cartoon in which Donald Duck had performed a similar trick on a sunken boat with table-tennis balls. If the BASF scheme proves successful in practice and enables valuable wrecks to be salvaged it is unlikely that Walt Disney will be credited as the inventor.
Leonardo da Vinci's original ideas for flight were inevitably unpatented; but, in 1842, the Englishmen, Stringfellow and Henson, were granted a patent containing details of an aircraft of which a heavier-than-air model was reputed to have flown 60 years before Wilbur and Orville Wright. Another Englishman, James Butler, patented a jet engine in 1867 — a full 70 years before Frank Whittle's famous British patent for jet propulsion.
Incidentally, Whittle's patent was allowed to lapse after only four years, through non-payment of renewal fees, and passed into the public domain as early as January, 1934; but, by then, the inventor had signed an agreement with the Air Ministry.
Even the apparently safe history of the telephone and gramophone contains some surprises. US legal case law details how an American called Drawbaugh had ideas for a telephone which anticipated Bell's patents of 1875-76 by five years; but it was Alexander Graham Bell who made the system practical on a commercial level and was acknowledged and rewarded as inventor.
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The future will produce many similar situations. Patents are daily being granted for ideas from inventors for schemes that cannot yet work — but that one day, following massive investment by industry, will become a reality. It is remarkably easy to sit in the comfort of an armchair and patent pipe-dreams which are nothing more than prophecies of the future and problems for others to solve.
В) Touchy-Feely Computing
Imagine living with just two of your five senses: vision and hearing. That's the sensory.-deprived state of personal computing today, PCs communicate with their users almost exclusively via images and sounds, ignoring all the other cues that humans rely on to perceive the world. Admittedly, interacting with your computer through the senses of smell and taste may not be absolutely essential. But now PC users can try the iFeel mouse, a device from peripherals manufacturer Logitech that adds the all-important sense of touch to desktop computing.
The first tactile devices to hit the market were designed for medical training. Doctors-to-be use the instruments to virtually feel the right way to perform a catheterization or a spinal infection. Engineers and architects employ similar devices for computer-assisted design, allowing them to "touch" the contours of their three-dimensional models. And for a few years now, computer gamers have been playing with force-feedback joysticks that can simulate a machine gun's recoil or the stresses on an airplane's controls. But no touch-feedback device for general-purpose computing was available until the introduction of the iFeel mouse last year.
The iFeel looks like an ordinary mouse (albeit one attractively finished in iridescent teal blue). And its retail price is modest—only $10 more than a comparable mouse without touch feedback.. There are two models available: a simple symmetrical design that sells for $39 and a $59 premium version that has a contoured shape intended to fit the hand more comfortably. Both are optical devices that detect movement with reflected light rather than with a less precise trackball.
At the pulsating heart of the new mouse is technology licensed from Immersion Corporation, which pioneered the development of touch-feedback systems in the 1990s. Louis Rosenberg, the company's chairman, says the key hardware component is a 25-gram motor that can move up and down, imparting about 150 grams of force against the user's hand. The mouse can also vibrate up to 300 times a second, enabling the device to reproduce a wide range of sensations. For example, Immersion's special-effects software library allows Web site developers to enhance pages with simulated textures such as corduroy or sandpaper. When the iFeel user drags the cursor across such a page, the mouse rapidly jiggles up and down, as if it were traveling over a rough surface.
Trying out the iFeel mouse for the first time can be disconcerting. The installation is straightforward: just plug this USB device into an appropriate computer port and load the driver software from a CD-ROM. (Mac users are out of luck; so far the mouse works only with Windows.) Once connected, the iFeel fundamentally alters one's perception of Windows' familiar screens. If you slide the cursor across one of the desktop program icons, the mouse shakes like dice in a cup. If you glide the mouse over the selections in a menu bar, it feels like a set of chattering false teeth. Push the iFeel back and forth over the options in a pull-down menu, and it hums like an electric shaver. The mouse also shakes up Web pages (iFeel works with either Explorer or Netscape, but Explorer must be installed on the computer even if you use only Netscape). The most noticeable sensation is the bump that occurs when the cursor crosses a hot link or menu choice.
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For anyone accustomed to an inert mouse, such physical cues may be distracting. Because people have different thresholds for sensing force, Immersion's software developers have provided access to an onscreen control for adjusting the strength of the feedback. Another control allows you to choose a different set of sensations. In addition to the default setting (which simulates the feeling of tapping a wooden surface), the iFeel offers six other options: crisp, metallic, spongy, rubbery, steel drum and sonic vibe.
With continued use, something unexpected happens: the iFeel's twitching becomes an organic part of the computing experience. The mouse's motions provide gentle reinforcement when one is steering the cursor to a desired point on the screen. In poorly designed Web pages crowded with text, the iFeel can make it easier to find and click on links to other sites. And when a program crashes, the mouse's palpable shudder is considerably less annoying than the audible "bonk" with which Windows signals an urgent error message.
Currently most of the creative uses for iFeel are game-related. With the help of Immersion's special-effects library, the developers of computer games can simulate the jolt of an explosion, the recoil of a gun, the zing of a crossbow and even the hum of a light saber. A handful of Web pages have been modified to take advantage of the iFeel's abilities, offering exotic effects such as lions roaring and auto engines starting. But these sites scarcely demonstrate the full potential of this technology. (Scientific American)
г) Текст “Powerful management capabilities for a variety of networks”
Nokia's OMC architecture is designed according to the ITU-T Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) recommendations. The Nokia OMC can be scaled up from a small network configuration to a large configuration, and upgrading information processing power and storage capacity is a simple operation.
Cost-efficient Operation
The Nokia OMC is designed to manage networks efficiently. In the hands of the operator, the Nokia OMC is a tool which maximises the performance of the network and minimises operating costs. The key to this is flexible centralisation: control and configuration functions can be performed from remote locations through the central control point. Thus, the operator can manage the network efficiently by optimising the availability of skilled personnel.
Better Quality of Service
The quality and continuity of network service are primary concerns of operators. The Nokia OMC can be used to accurately locate and evaluate any network failures in real-time. The user can also monitor the quality of service: service-related problems are detected and corrected as they arise. In addition, the user is provided with valuable information about network performance and the load carried by the network. Based on this information, the user can make adjustments in the network when necessary.
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